To Fall Among Vultures

by Scott Warren

  "Tactical, deploy pursuit screen now."

  Two small missiles fell back from the aft tubes of the Condor, deploying a reactive ceramic cloud between her and the Primary. With two fighters and only the waste heat of her engine, it was difficult for the xenos to determine the range to focus their weapons. The lasers on the craft could be configured for a range-finding mode, and the emitters on the Primary fighter began to flash in rapid succession. The energy alone from the ranging could potentially damage the Condor, but these new laser countermeasures seemed to do the trick. The ceramic particles reacted to the light-energy by transforming it to heat and expanding rapidly to block the distant fighters from view and offer nothing but garbage returns to their sensors. It forced the closer fighter to abandon the ideal ranging formation and waste energy adding lateral acceleration, giving the Condor precious seconds to accelerate to a safe Alcubierre vector. Huian Wong kept the ceramic countermeasure screen between the Condor and the fighters as best as the woman could without sacrificing acceleration.

  Indigo light flashed within a dozen lengths of the Condor as the second fighter began taking wild stabs with his laser array using his limited knowledge of the Condor’s position and path.

  "Vick, ready to deploy anti-fighter defenses on your mark."

  "Hold, tactical," said Victoria. The lasers were growing closer and more focused as the range shrank and the sensor returns improved, but firing the dummy missiles too soon would give the fighter too much time to react, and she needed his response to be survival instinct, not the calculation of a hunter defeating a prey’s defenses.

  "Conn sensors, the sweep on the secondary just narrowed. Zero bearing rate, waste heat increase from his engines. He’s closing in."

  The fighters could accelerate faster than a bad night of drinking, and if the frigate stayed behind it spoke to their confidence in the abilities of the pilots. Victoria glanced at her repeaters. That second fighter, she could play to that confidence. Let him think he had the kill.

  "Engineering conn, vent heat portside."

  Small alarms showed as hot coolant sprayed from the port ventricles of the engine room, presenting an enormous thermal signature for the Secondary to see on his thermal scope. The randomly firing lasers ceased as the pilot squeezed every ounce of power into his engines, the distance track closing at an alarming rate. To the fighter, it looked like one of his blind shots got lucky and hit something critical, and now it was just a matter of finishing the job. But he got careless too, and forgot to vary his bearing as he closed.

  "Tactical, fire the dummies," Victoria said. Her voice was calm, despite her heart attempting to beat its way through her chest as she felt the shuddering of the half-dozen missiles launch from the aft tubes on the Condor. Privateer ships had a variety of rear-facing weapons. They tended to do a lot of running for their lives.

  "Huian, take us about. Vector away from the Primary and get us clear for transition."

  "Aye skipper."

  There was a brief moment of risk as the Condor presented a broadside to the Secondary, silhouetting itself against the vented coolant. But in that moment all six missiles screamed to life on a fume of solid propellant, blasting the fighter with a bevy of active radar in various lock-on profiles. Completely superfluous EM radiation, as they received all of their targeting information from the Condor’s main computer. But the intended effect was simple, gut-wrenching, bowel-loosening horror. The sudden appearance of the seemingly deadly ordinance, stripped of their payload in favor of greater acceleration, took the fighter completely off guard. For a brief instant, there was no reaction as the pilot was caught between an ideal targeting solution and the certain death homing in on his craft.

  "Conn sensors, secondary is reversing thrust, laser refraction pattern suggests a point-defense configuration. He’s breaking off the attack," said Avery.

  "Huian, get us out of here before he thinks to tell his wingman about our course change."

  "Aye ma’am."

  The tone of the engines softened to a dull roar as Huian Wong pulled the Condor back from emergency acceleration, and Victoria relaxed back into the conn. On the main screen, two of the missiles winked out when the fighter’s point defense clipped them, and the other four sailed past as he desperately tried to change his vector. When the fighter’s pilot found himself still alive, his thrust signature dulled. He abandoned the emergency evasive maneuvers and his laser banks stopped producing their defensive light-show. Victoria had no doubt that whoever was in that craft knew full-well she held the pilot’s life in her hands and chose to be merciful. Most of these xenos weren’t sure how to handle that. Some saw it as weakness, others as opportunity. Some, as her new Vautan shipmate demonstrated, saw it as convenience. The pilot at the controls of the fighter craft flashed his engines in two short bursts, an acknowledgment of her tactics. An interstellar tip of the hat.

  Victoria snarled under her breath and thumbed the main circuit. "Stand down from battle stations," she said. The Vultures had almost no time to get the crew off that hulk, let alone pry loose any carrion. Goodwill didn’t fill exotic matter tanks. She pushed herself up and stormed off the conn. She dropped down to the mid-level and was heading for the ancillary cargo bay when she was intercepted by Sergeant Aesop Cohen, her marine xenotech specialist, still in his vacuum suit.

  "Captain, I was just coming to see you," the boy said, the distress clear in his eyes. Tears stained the corners.

  "Christ, Cohen, what happened to you?"

  The marine laughed, then coughed, and wiped his nose on the ceramic plate of his armored sleeve. "The Vautan, ma’am. Their skin reacts . . . poorly with oxygen. Secretes a cyanocarbon chemical that reminds me of chem-war training I had at Tel Aviv. At the end, we had to take off our gas masks and sing Hatikvah in a room full of CS. Not harmful, but not pleasant."

  "They’re walking, talking tear gas grenades. Fuck me. Tell me you were on your way to deliver something other than that. Did we get anything?"

  Cohen grinned. "That officer of theirs made a fuss, I think he was going to go back on whatever deal you made. The crew of the Kreshna almost left him over there, but settled for bringing him bound and gagged, which for them apparently means stuffing a big cork plug in that radial saw they’ve got for a mouth."

  Cohen presented a small device to her, held as delicately as a newborn in his gloved hand. "One of their engineers was a quick thinker, pulled this off the ship’s databanks before he scuttled them. Full schematics for their forward laser array, if we can find a system to interface with it. We don’t know much about Vautan computers."

  Schematics were, by and large, inferior to physical parts. Scientists jumped ahead years by analyzing and duplicating xenotech alloys and composites. And complex devices that eluded the top minds of the Union Earth still opened doors to new possibilities. Drawings and diagrams could go a long way toward putting the puzzle together once they had all the bits and bobs, and the Vautan ships the UE encountered were only a few hundred years ahead of Earth technologically. But such a divide was surmountable only with the proper application of reverse engineering, and for that Victoria needed physical parts. Union Earth had been after a shortcut to ship-borne lasers for some time now, especially following her experience with a Dirregaunt battleship almost cutting her ship in half at two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers the year previous, out of direct line of sight, by refracting the beam across the upper atmosphere of a planet. Hell, these schematics might finally be the key that let scientists crack the mystery of how the xenos could pump so much energy into their weapon systems without their ships exploding. But she doubted it.

  With the hold smelling like the inside of a CS gas grenade, Vick headed for the foremost compartment, as far physically as she could get from the Vautan rescues. The tip of the spear was her Fire Control compartment, where her executive officer was squeezed into a console between two technicians and a midshipman learning the ropes before taking a post on another Privateer.

&
nbsp; Even though the ship was standing down from general quarters, XO Cesar Carillo still had his nose to the screen, poring over potential firing solutions derived from a steady stream of sensor data. When it came time for the shooting, Carillo was the hand that aimed the gun, and his grip was as steady as his midsection was thick. Which was to say, very. In fact, Victoria never determined how the man kept getting cleared for space duty with his physique. Maybe he ate the physicians. Or maybe you didn’t kick out someone who stared down the barrel of hypersonic fighter craft without flinching. Victoria could see stains at the neck and armpits of the technicians, and you could have wrung out the midshipman’s hair into a bucket. But Carillo’s uniform was dry as a vacuum-sealed turd. He’d probably sleep through a firefight if she let him.

  "Captain," he said beneath a wiggling gray mustache and bushy black brows. It wasn’t a question or an invitation, simply an affirmation of her presence. It unnerved her, somewhat, that he seemed preternaturally aware of when she entered a room, and that typically he would make his egress moments prior. The two technicians turned, startled for a moment at her sudden appearance. Victoria jerked a thumb behind her. "Cobb, Mavis, out," she said. She pointed at the midshipman, a hint of a smile on the young woman’s face. Probably thought she was getting included in the big-girl conversation. "What rig are you slotted for?"

  "The UE Artemis, Ma’am."

  "Shit, we’d better not get too chummy then. You’ll probably be stardust within a year. Out."

  Once the red-faced junior officer had left the fire control room Victoria leaned against the bulkhead.

  "A fucking cabbie service, that’s what we are, Cesar. Give us a ring and we’ll come pull you out of a jam. No no, put that wallet away, your reactive charging coils are no good here. This one’s on us."

  "There are worse things than being harmless, Vick," said Carillo.

  "I know. But what are we doing out here? Six months ago we were running Malagath princes through Dirregaunt blockades. The Big Three are barely even seen in this corridor now."

  Carillo laughed, "And we’ve hauled more tech in these last six months than in the prior two tours combined. And we did it without the Dirregaunt breathing down our necks. Why let this xeno under your skin, Vick?"

  "I have no goddamned idea. Maybe it was his expectations, maybe his lack of respect, or maybe how stupid he was to open a comms channel. Take your pick. But after we dump his ass off at Ersis, we’re going to take a hard look at what we’re doing out here. Humanity can’t just be a free ride if we want to survive in this galaxy."

  "You should leave that sort of talk to the politicians, Vick," said Carillo.

  The dull roar of the ion engine cut abruptly as an oscillating whine crept up in its place. The Alcubierre drive pushed the Condor into superluminal transit. The mining station was off the beaten path, in a system whose star didn’t support the properties ideal for a horizon jump. The trip to the nearest star that did would take them almost two weeks. Little happened during light speed transit, and so the ship would be put on Alcubierre stand-down with a minimal watch rotation. That was a long time for a captain to be alone with her thoughts, and Victoria did not particularly enjoy being alone with her thoughts. Paperwork and model spacecraft only kept her from the bottles that always seemed to find their way into her rack for so long.

  "No sense putting it off any longer," said Victoria. "I suppose it’s time to meet the new arrivals. Come on."

  Chapter 2 - Similar Stories

  Edrus Vaan had spent the better part of a year stationed on Listening Post 121 of 142, nestled comfortably outside the sixth and outermost planet of the system. He was alone, or at least he would be if his partner, Kal, ever managed to annoy him to the point of murdering her. It had been a close thing on more than one occasion. She favored the shrill poetry beamed from the surface of the planet Pedres, when the receiver was in a position to catch it and when he or a rogue solar storm didn’t manage to disable it. Unfortunately, his partner was an engineer, and the only thing that ever seemed to get repaired on the listening post was the multi-channeled acoustic receiver. It would be an easy thing, next time she took the skiff out, to rig the docking locks and leave her out there for the space walkers to come and collect.

  Sometimes he questioned the Maeyar Fleet Ops’ wisdom in sending husband and wife pairs to man long-term space postings.

  Before he could come up with more ingenious methods of making his wife’s untimely expiration appear accidental, a small alarm light flashed on his control panel. He looked at it, his lone eye swiveling as he pared the skin off the last of his preserved fruit. His attention moved to the small display in the wall, where numbers flashed in rapid succession, vectors and values which he was trained to interpret.

  He swallowed. "Kal, jewel of my existence, are you doing maintenance on the superluminal sensor array?"

  The high-pitched squeal of Kal Vaan’s plasmic welder cut out, leaving only the high-pitched squeal of her poetry. Transmitted through sublight radio waves, the recorded verses were more than four hours old before they reached the station and mounted an assault on his ears. Kal appeared through the hatch, still wearing her protective mask. "No, light of my morning. The superluminal array is functioning as it should."

  Edrus watched her perform the same scan he had just performed on the instrumentation.

  "Impossible," she said, "not even Malagath ships have a darkspace profile like that. I don’t know anything that does."

  "Could it be that human freighter back with another shipment?" asked Edrus. The strange, primitive race setting up a trade depot on Pedres with the Maeyar had spacecraft with antiquated darkspace engines that suggested craft of a much larger size on the FTL sensors. He dialed the vector into the optics system, state-of-the-art lenses with a light amplification module to magnify what little of the core star’s brilliance made it out this far. It would take a few seconds for that light to bounce off anything coming out of darkspace and return to the sensor, so he waited while his wife tapped away on a console, asking the neighboring station if their superluminal array also held the anomaly.

  The nearest station was a few light-minutes away, and Edrus’ quandary was answered through his optical sensors before the message ever reached them.

  "Dark stars," he whispered, as spacecraft began to fill his scope by the dozen. Nearly a hundred had transitioned into the system before he could pry himself away from the lenses. "Send a burst to Pedres, we’re under attack."

  Victoria stumbled off the ramp of the Condor’s airlock, gasping with relief. Ersis played host to a great many smells, few of them pleasant. But after the carnage the Vautan rescues wreaked on her nasal passages it was like being in the fresh spring air of Northern Ireland. Thank Christ they were finally off her ship. Four days of shore leave for the crew while the Condor deodorized would help to raise spirits as well. Ersis was on a moon orbiting a gas giant so closely that it was completely shrouded by its nitrogen-rich upper atmosphere. The low gravity and an atmosphere dense enough to breathe made it an instant favorite for an interstellar harbor and for the businesses that grew to support the shipping and their crews. The Vautan survivors would have no issue finding passage here and soon their schematics would be on their way to Earth via secure FTL channels. Four days meant time enough for her to put the Vautan officer and his arrogance behind her. And maybe find some humans she hadn’t seen every day for the last six months, and even more importantly, wouldn’t ever have to see again.

  As far as security was concerned, Ersis was about as safe as a xeno city could be if you avoided the rougher spots. Of course her Vultures were walking rough spots, and most of her marines would have to be hauled out of security lockup and stuffed back on the Condor. For personal protection, the sidearm on her hip and her Union Earth Privateer uniform jacket would suffice. Humanity was known to Ersis. Even so, she scowled as Major Calhoun caught the door of the magnetic train before she could get away. She ignored his self-satisfied smirk as he we
dged into the seat between her and a xeno her retinal implants had difficulty identifying. Protocol dictated the captain have a security detail on xeno planets and neutral stations. It would be batteries or nothing for another six months.

  The spaceport mooring the Condor accessed the city proper by automated trains traveling between free-standing magnetic relays. No visibly apparent force lifted the cars, but the ground smoothly fell away as Victoria lifted above the rooftops to her favorite part of the journey.

  "Look Red, that’s the Apex, one of the new class of light cruisers the Lereigh just put out. That forward ablative plate can shrug off almost anything short of a Malagath particle cannon. That at the next mooring over? That’s a Jenursa boat. Diplomatic, must be an ambassador yacht."

  Red, not normally interested in ships unless they were simulating boarding actions, leaned over and squinted.

  "Two down from that, that’s Maeyar, right? We pulled rescues off a smaller one."

  The public car carried them higher and she could indeed see the dorsal point defense microwave emitters of a Maeyar frigate.

  "Hell yeah, look, so is the one next to it. They’ve got those distinct flared fins back by the engines. Designed to dip into atmo, that’s why they’re so streamlined and have that reinforced ridge running down either shoulder. Those are vibration dampeners, those things can pull mach levels that would shake most ships apart. Love to get my hands on some of them."